During our short trip to Melbourne last week, we spent a morning at the Melbourne cemetery primarily to look up memorials of explorers and prime ministers, but there was an intended discovery – dozens and dozens of old Chinese graves that dated back as early as the middle of the 19th century, the days of the Gold Rush.
Most interesting were the origins of those old Chinese immigrants, which by tradition were indicated on the gravestones; they all invariable came from Taishan and Xinhui, two of the Siyi (“Siyup”) or Four Districts west of Guangzhou, where my paternal grandfather was born. People in Siyi all speak a special common dialect which is a variation of Cantonese that predominate in the Guanzhou and Hong Kong area, a dialect which I do not speak because I was brought up using my mother’s Hokkien dialect. Dad had told me long ago that many Siyi people emigrated to Melbourne (and San Francisco) and there in the Melbourne cemetery I found were the proofs! What I did not realise was that most of the Chinese immigrants of the Gold Rush days came from the Siyi area.
Like Sydney, there are many Asians in Melbourne today and many of them from China. Some are obviously students, while others travel in groups as tourists. Associated with the growth of the tourist industry has been the proliferation of shops supplying goods and services to Chinese visitors, same as what we have noticed in Sydney. The shops not only sell goods popular with the visitors but also arrange for the goods to be sent separately back to China, saving them the inconvenience of carting the goods themselves.
To Kay and I, the most interesting of all was the nature of the goods that the shops stocked. Apart from items such as lavender bears made popular by Xi Jinping and his wife, there was a big range of products made from sheep and goats, and not just the traditional fleece and lanolin but far more exotic such as placenta of sheep, added into moisturisers or in tablet form as health supplement! Who says Australia does not have a manufacturing industry!
